[geeks] Java as a first language

[Jochen Kunz]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2006 15:05:39 -0500 (EST)
kevin marshall <kevin at mpcf.com> wrote:

> However, i had always heard that C was a bad
> language to start with because it would teach bad habits.
Depends on your discipline and your teacher. You can shoot your own foot
with C easily. You have to know how to handle your shooting iron. If you
start with e.g. Pascal, a classical "learning language", the language
imposes some restrictions to avoid foot shooting. But these limitations
limit also the usability of the language. There will be a point where
you have to play dirty tricks to work around those limitations. Or you
switch from Pascal to C when you learned the basics. But then you have
to learn two languages and you still have to learn how to avoid the
dangerous aspects of C. C is "hard to learn" because you need to know
what is going on behind the scenes and you have to keep this in mind
when you are coding. Basicly the "hard to learn" part is just to know
how a computer and a compiler works and to what machine code your C code
is translated.

C gives you the freedom to do what you want. But freedom is power and
you have the responsibility to handle this power with care.
--


tsch|_,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/